A review by teriboop
The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, With a New Preface by Khalil Gibran Muhammad

4.0

"There are three kinds of lies, someone has said, 'white lies, black lies, and statistics.'" (p 48) Khalil Gibran Muhammad's The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America" looks at how data/statistics created the construct of the "negro problem" that established itself into American society by Nathaniel Southgate Shaler in 1884. Utilizing data, particularly from early census records and crime statistics, Shaler and others created a narrative that portrayed African Americans as grossly inferior to white Americans. Included in the "white American" class were other European immigrants, like Irish Americans who were also once thought of as lowly people in white Americans' eyes. Muhammad asks, "…how did European immigrants – the Irish and the Italians and the Polish, for example – gradually shed their criminal identities while blacks did not?" (p 5) As the European immigrant was enveloped into the category of white Americans, the disparity grew for African Americans. The issue of Black criminality was labeled as “black people’s problem” while white criminality was society’s problem. This narrative framed black criminality as an indicator of African Americans' inferiority in the late 19th to early 20th century American society that we see today.

Muhammad also looks at the activists and reformers who attempted to change the narrative, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Jane Addams and a crime wave between 1917-1919 in response to heightened violence in policing and punishment.

Working with data daily in my job, I know how quantitative data can be used to twist a narrative, however, you need. Numbers themselves don't lie, but how one uses those numbers, how one compiles and extrapolates them can be telling or not. It's easy to see how the data was used so many years ago to create a mindset that sadly lives on today.